SEO is a highly effective and powerful marketing tool. With SEO, you can achieve your marketing goals by engaging potential customers and driving direct sales. However, SEO effort can be complicated and time consuming, requiring many companies to hire the service of SEO consultants. SEO isn’t rocket science, but many things can go wrong if it’s performed poorly. When your website is managed by consultants, you need to make sure that your website is easy to discover and high visibility. You need to reach out to consultant, who is in charge of any SEO operation. When you hire SEO consultants, they are accountable to you and if your traffic is tanking, it may not be your only concern. As an example, SEO consultants may actually use some shady techniques, such as creating low quality or even spammy outbound links for your website.
When performed wrongly, your website could end up getting a penalty from Google. However, you should know that your SEO consultant is answerable to you. You can ask them what they are doing, so you can prevent that things will take the turn for the worse. You need to bear in mind that your business will be the one that takes the hit. If there’s a noticeable drop in ranking, than you should be aware of various external and internal factors. If there’s a recent algorithm change by Google and your rank drops, then find out whether it’s caused by newly implemented penalties. Check whether your SEO consultants implement some ill-advised techniques. So, it’s a good idea for you to learn about common techniques that are usually implemented by black-hat SEO practitioners. You should know what your consultant has been doing so far.
So, what you should do if you find out that your SEO consultant is doing something wrong. Many times, your consultant will shirk and they are not answerable to any issue that affects your website. When you see early signs of bad practices, you should hire an independent consultant to audit your website. Get a finalized result of the audit and make a list of evidences that the outsourced SEO team didn’t follow SEO best practices. This could only mean one thing, that is to fire the consultant. However, the consultant could be hired on a retainer basis, such as 6 or 12 months, depending on the agreement. So, there’s nothing you can do if you are still bound by the contract agreement. If you can’t fire the consultant at this period, simply don’t use their service, because this will make your situation to get worse. Immediately change username and password of your server, website management panel, database and other company assets that your consultant may access.
When hiring a new consultant, make sure that you opt for six or if possible three months of retainer period. So, you can monitor your new consultant better and find out whether they are doing things properly. After the first retainer period ends, you can decide whether you should extend it.